© 2006 William Ahearn
There are lines or scenes in films that cut right to the bone. Somewhere
during my first viewing in 1969 of Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch”
I heard – between the temperance union being mowed down and the carnage
of the last slaughter – an exchange between Pike Bishop (William Holden),
the leader of the title’s gang, and Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine),
a long-time gang member and friend. They are discussing Deke Thornton (Robert
Ryan), a former gang member who was let out of prison to track his former
friends for the railroad bounty hunters.
Pike Bishop: He gave his word.
Dutch Engstrom: He gave his word to a railroad.
Pike Bishop: It’s his word.
Dutch Engstrom: That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to.
That dialog, in a Hollywood western, confirmed that Sergio Leone
with “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964 had in fact killed the classic
western and I, for one, was glad to see it go. Oddly, the same conversation
– more or less – took place in Richard Brooks’ “The
Professionals” (1966) that many see as a precursor to “The Wild
Bunch.” That may be true but the spirit of “The Professionals”
and “The Wild Bunch” is so disparate as to be related only superficially.
The movies have much and absolutely nothing in common.
The American western had always been the epitome of good
guy versus bad guy or good guy versus savage and even as a child I found the
stories lame excuses for a morality no one was really interested in as a way
of life.
The typical American western was an exercise and justification
of the nightmare of manifest destiny and a sterile example of simple living
for a population that lived, for the most part, a rural life. When the first
western – “The Great Train Robbery” (1903) – was released
most US citizens were involved in the commerce of agriculture. By 1969 that
number had dwindled and has been dwindling ever since. Someone could possibly
draw a descending line showing the moral degradation as it relates to the
migration of souls from the righteous soil to the satan-spawned flesh pits
of the city, but I can’t. For what it’s worth, I find the ethical
depictions in “The Wild Bunch” as valid as any given by so-called
ethicists and way more honest.
When I hear politicians rattle on about being ethical, I
always think of the dusty and grizzled members of The Wild Bunch and laugh
myself silly. In my heart, I would trust Pike or Dutch long before I would
trust most posing suits spilling buzz words and claiming a mode of behavior
that they just aren’t capable of.
There were some exceptions to the typical Hollywood cowboy giddyap
outing: Howard Hughes’ “The Outlaw,” with its barely submerged
homo-eroticism; John Ford’s “The Searchers” that dealt with
content most cowboy flicks ignored although I think it’s a totally overrated
film; Nicholas Ray’s so-called Freudian and now creaky and even ridiculous
“Johnny Guitar”; and even “The Magnificent Seven”
(which was based on Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” as
“A Fistful of Dollars” was based on Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo”).
(If you haven’t seen the Kurosawa films, go see them now. Akira
Kurosawa is one of the best filmmakers who ever lived. He is just utterly
amazing even half a century since his first films were made.)
What saved “The Magnificent Seven” was a great
cast with a great score. Other than that, it just seems to be a fairytale
of US foreign intervention to save the humble, smiling peasants from the clutches
of bandits (that probably worked for the CIA). The low-intensity conflicts
of the 1960s and 1970s dimmed the optimistic world-view of the flick and now
it seems dated in a touching and naïve way. Even “High Noon,”
made some eight years prior to “The Magnificent Seven,” holds
up better and remains one of my favorite westerns.
It would be interesting to see how Marlon Brando's "One-Eyed Jacks" would have turned out had Stanley Kubrick directed it as was originally planned. Brando shot enough footage for a five-hour version and the studio cut it down to 141 minutes. The footage has been lost so there won't be a director's cut and to be honest I can't see a five-hour film based on a basic revenge plot. Definitely worth seeing if only to see Brando do an Elvis Presley impression for the first half hour or so.
The character of Shane in the film of the same name is often described as iconic. It's hard to find any character as far as I'm concerned that isn't cardboard or wooden. Here's a gunslinger who has no interest in gambling, women, drinking, or much of anything else except hanging out in the bunkhouse ironing his cowboy outfit. It's the basic evil ranchers against the good and simple farmers scenario and Shane just wanders in and stays when he realizes how annoying Brandon De Wilde can be when he's yelling "Shane, Shane" all the time. This is pretty much everything I can't stand in a western.
"3:10 to Yuma" is a completely different story based on a book by Elmore Leonard. Nice cinematography and the direction is uneven but the atypical story and how it's played makes for a tense and underrated film.
“The Wild Bunch” also deals with Mexico and troubled
peasants but Sam Peckinpah’s Mexico isn’t the country idealized
by Hollywood but the mythic Mexico that attracted writers as diverse as Ambrose
Bierce (who may or may not of been killed by Pancho Villa), Graham Greene,
Jim Thompson and Cormac McCarthy to name a few. It is an equally false Mexico
and the perfect place for six old-school desperados – who have found
themselves lost in the new century – to end it all. Sam Peckinpah may
have been an erratic director but in “The Wild Bunch” everything
he had been working toward came together with a great script, a fabulous cast
and a cinematographer and crew that would give life to his vision.
It’s a vision of individualism disappearing into a
modern landscape. The gang may be robbers and killers but in Peckinpah’s
world they aren’t much worse than the Mexican generals fighting Pancho
Villa and Emilio Zapata or the railroad barons and their henchman willing
to sacrifice innocent townspeople to kill Pike Bishop, Dutch Engstrom and
the others. If there is a telltale spin to the role of innocents in this story
it is in the children and their actions and behaviors.
Sergio Leone may have opened the door for a new take on the
western but Sam Peckinpah blew through it with both barrels blasting. “The
Wild Bunch” is more layered and a far more political film than its Italian
cousins such as “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” and “Once
Upon a Time in the West.” Peckinpah’s characters aren’t
merely mercenary. They have an ethical code that fits perfectly the criminal
world that they are confronted with. And that is odd. In 1960s, one always
looked to the Europeans for the political view and they seemed to have a lock
on the nililistitic view of the coming future but Peckinpah goes them one
better creating not anti-heroes but real men dedicated to an ethos they find
valuable. That ethos – which I contend is as valuable as any contrived
by the canon of modern pop philosophy – is what separates “The
Wild Bunch” from posers such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid” or any other number of “new” westerns.
It’s interesting to note that not much in the way of westerns
has followed “The Wild Bunch.” There was Robert Altman’s
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” which is beautifully shot and operates
in one of the best western sets but ends up being a small joke about what
idiots men can be about women who don’t care about them. Arthur Penn’s
“Little Big Man,” is a comic saga about the old west that has
its moments but tosses most of them off. Lawrence Kasden’s “Silvarado,”
a film so many people swear by and yet I didn’t get it. Kevin Costner’s
“Dances With Wolves,” a film where I liked the script a lot more
than I did the movie. Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” is perhaps
the best of the group and it’s the best picture Eastwood has done by
far.
So when I heard that a director’s cut of “The
Wild Bunch” was being released (this was some time ago), I was really
looking forward to seeing it. The original studio release had 2500 cuts made
to the version that Peckinpah delivered, or so the story goes, and I wanted
to see the complete vision. It is one of my favorite films and also a groundbreaking
film and that coincidence doesn’t always occur.
Sorry to say it but I came away from the director’s
cut of “The Wild Bunch” severely disappointed. With the exception
of the telegraph office scene almost all of the restored material was not
only unnecessary but added a spin to the film that I think detracts from its
purpose and its cinematic power.
The telegraph office scene was important because it gave
a depth to Gen. Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) that the original movie didn’t.
The scene seems to have inspired the famous “napalm in the morning”
scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” where
Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) casually walks among the incoming mortar
shells and small arms fire. The cut scene also expanded on the Mexican child
who would play a vital role at the end of the film and also add to the whole
mythology of children that Peckinpah was creating in the movie.
There is also some restored violence and in some movies that
might seem gratuitous, but “The Wild Bunch” – as most of
Peckinpah’s later movies – is about violence itself and the cinematography
of violence in the film changed the perception of violence in films forever.
What I was disappointed with is the
unnecessary back-story of Deke Thornton. Robert Ryan is one of my favorite
actors because his character’s story is always told in his face. To
see Robert Ryan as a cowboy or a boxer or a cop or a newspaperman is to know
that character almost immediately and not through predictable or trite pieces
of acting business but through subtle gestures and the use of his voice. Robert
Ryan is one of the few actors whose characters just don’t need explaining.
We know who he is after two minutes of screen time. Nothing is really gained
by this added footage: The camaraderie, the mutual debts, the shared danger
is implicit in the rest of the movie. All the back-story accomplishes is to
bog down a narrative that needs to travel faster than a speeding bullet.
But the biggest sin of the director’s cut isn’t the bloated
narrative. It’s the added element of sentimentality that it brings to
a film that has absolutely no need of it. Sergio Leone created – among
other things – anti-romantic, anti-sentimental, violent movies. In effect,
they were anti-Hollywood cowboy movies and a generation of filmgoers ate them
up. Clint Eastwood got that part right in “Unforgiven” and it
– along with the great cast and crew – is what makes it work.
It’s funny in a way, that the studio cut the sentimentality out of “The
Wild Bunch.” It’s almost as if they knew that making an anti-Hollywood
cowboy movie actually played to their own self-interests.
It’s still an amazing film and still one of my favorites.
As Freddie Sykes (Edmund O’Brien), the grizzled old-timer put it at
the end of the film:
“It’s not like it was, but it’ll do.”